Pitfall! creator David Crane named videogame pioneer

In the days when games were created by just one man, David Crane was a superstar.

The market for home videogame machines was just beginning to flourish in the late seventies, when Crane was single-handedly cranking out groundbreaking games for the Atari 2600 console, which was practically the only game in town.

"Unlike today, games for the Atari game system were developed by a single person," said Crane in an email to Wired. "Each of us did all of the design, graphics, music, sound effects and even the play-testing for our own games."

Kids across the nation waited patiently for new game cartridges to show up in stores. All the games came directly from Atari, as the idea of independent gamemakers hadn't yet crossed anyone's mind. Crane, who created games like Pitfall!(pictured above) and Freeway, was the wunderkind of the Atari era, pulling off amazing technical tricks on primitive hardware and creating some of the period's bestselling and most influential titles.

Perhaps equally important, Crane was an entrepreneur. He helped change the face of the videogame business forever when he split from Atari to co-found Activision, the first third-party game publisher.

It's fitting, then, that the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, the industry group which puts on the prestigious DICE Summit each year, would choose Crane as the recipient of its first Pioneer Award, which recognizes videogaming visionaries who took the first steps in the early days of the industry. The academy will present Crane with the award at its 13th annual Interactive Achievement Awards ceremony Feb. 18 in Las Vegas, the academy revealed exclusively to Wired.

"Being involved with the first platformer and the first third-party developer isn't something many people can put on their resumes," said WayForward Technologies' Sean Velasco in an email interview with Wired. "Before they became a huge juggernaut, Activision fought for developers' rights and recognition."

Crane cut his teeth in the industry at a time when videogame creation was much more of a solo act. Atari's designers were given a computer terminal and a rudimentary manual, then asked to produce a game -- any game. To be successful, they had to be an artist, designer and programmer all in one. And Crane didn't think his bosses at Atari appreciated that.

"That seemed like a valuable set of skills that ought to be recognised," he said. "After all, the author of a book is credited for his work, why not a videogame?"

Armed with the knowledge that games like Outlaw and Canyon Bomber, which he had single-handedly (but anonymously) created for the company, had resulted in a $20 million year for Atari in 1978, Crane and his fellow designers approached the top brass and asked for more money and proper recognition.

Atari practically laughed them out of the room: "You are no more important to the product than the guy on the assembly line who puts them together," Crane remembers being told by Atari's president.

So in 1979, Crane, along with fellow game creators Bob Whitehead, Alan Miller and Larry Kaplan, split Atari and formed Activision. In addition to giving its designers a fairer share of the profits, Activision prominently featured their names on the packaging, even going so far as to print their photographs in the games' instruction manuals.

At Activision, Crane truly flourished as a game designer, both creatively and technically. The Atari 2600 was a bizarre piece of hardware, built only to run a few variations on arcade games like Pong and Tank. Doing anything more complicated wasn't supposed to be possible, but Crane kept smashing the boundaries with games like Freeway and Dragster.

"The Atari 2600 was by far the most challenging platform in the history of gaming. And the very challenges that had many people tearing out their hair made it the most fun for me," said Crane, a lover of puzzles who saw the 2600 as a massive, complex brain-teaser.